A new video has been added to the Developing with Flash Lite Series – “Get to know Flash Lite for the Digital Home”.

Flash Lite for the Digital Home is the jumping point for application developers to move their existing skills and experience onto an entirely new screen – the TV! In this episode we outline the fundamentals of understanding Flash for TV, and some of the things developers will need to consider.

A new video has just been added to the Developing with Flash Lite series – Platform Services and the Accelerometer.

Interacting with an application through the in-built accelerometer adds a dimension of usability that is deeply linked with the physical world – you move your device, the application responds accordingly. In this episode we’ll look at adding accelerometer access to your Flash mobile application using Nokia’s Platform Services.

A new video has just been added to the Developing with Flash Lite series – “Accessing GPS using Nokia Platform Services“.

In regards to creating contextually aware mobile applications, Location represents one of the most important contexts to consider. Enabling your application to understand the user’s location can mean a more relevant experience. In this episode we look at using Nokia’s Platform Services for S60 5th Edition to access GPS data within your Flash Lite mobile application (apologies for the slightly fuzzy film work on the device at the end!).

Download the source files for this video.

A new video has just been added to the Developing with  Flash Lite series – “Streaming MP3 Audio with Flash Lite 3.1“.

As opposed to previous versions of the Flash Lite runtime, Flash Lite 3.1 enables developers to work with streaming MP3 audio data – decoding and playing the sound file before it has fully loaded. In this episode we look at how that works by building a streaming media player.

I’ve also added downloadable source files for many of the video tutorials in the series (including this one) so that you can follow along easier as you watch. The video individual pages on Vimeo have the links, as well as the Training page here on my blog.

A new video has just been added to the “Developing with Flash Lite” video training series – “Working with Change Screen Orientation“.

Automatic screen rotation is a common feature in today’s mobile devices, especially those with touch-screens. Making sure your Flash mobile application responds accordingly to these environment changes is very important. In this episode, we take a look at a couple of ActionScript techniques for handling automatic screen rotation.

Mark has posted some stats on the uptake of Adobe Mobile Packager, with the main indicator being that installs have reached 100,000.

Coupled with an apparent increase in player downloads through the Adobe Version Checker that’s a part of the Flash Lite Distributable Player solution, things are trending in the right direction here.

Read Mark’s post here.

Mark is obviously enjoying his new HTC Hero device There is a two part extensive post over on his blog going through some basic Android SDK development in regards to using the Flash (Lite 3.1) standalone player on the device to launch applications.

Mark IS an engineer at heart after all, so take a look if you would like to get started with Flash on Android and the HTC Hero.

Mark Doherty has given some extensive thought to his initial impressions of the new HTC Hero Android device, which runs Flash Lite 3.1 in various implementations.

It’s a bit of a breakthrough Android device and the fact that Flash has been so highly marketed along with the device specs is something also note worthy.

Take a read of what Mark has to say …

Via Mark: Adobe Mobile Packager 1.1 is now ready for download. This version includes some big improvements in workflow and functionality, and makes life a lot easier for Flash mobile developers wanting to package their content for the  FL3.1 Distributable Player on selected S60 and Windows Mobile devices.

Liz Meyers has produced an updated series of video tutorials for AMP1.1 which you’ll fund useful in getting started, or updating yourself, with what’s in the tool and how to use it. The video topics are:

1. Overview
2. Set-up Your Computer
3. Making Your First Packages
4. Symbian Signing
5. Windows Mobile Signing
6. Icon Boot Camp

Recently Nokia released an update to the Flash Lite 3 player on their 5800 XpressMusic device (S60 5th Edition), upgrading it to 3.1 via their “App Update” mechanism. While there’s been a few bugs found with the new 3.1 update that gets installed, it did signal a departure from the firmware upgrade path for updating on-device software, and certainly makes it a lot easier for device owners to stay up to date.

Nokia have also just added to their ActionScript API (S60 Platform Services) a new Device object , for use only with the FL3.1 runtime on S60 5th Ed (and selected S60 3rd Ed FP2) devices. This is in addition to the Service object, which opens access to APIs such as Location, Contacts and Messaging through native ActionScript 2.0 classes.

The new Device object has two methods, one of which solves a problem that myself and may other Flash developers have had hassles with on Nokia S60 5th Ed touch devices – auto rotation. The methods are

• DisableAutoRotation - Disables automatic screen rotation on the device (woo!)
• ExpediteConnection - Starts the network connection setup process for the Flash Lite application

Before you can create Flash Lite applications that use the Device object you must install the corresponding ActionScript 2.0 class files for your Flash IDE:

1. Download the S60 ActionScript API library package (ZIP) to your computer by clicking the following link: S60_ActionScript_API_library_1_0.zip
2. Extract the package to the class path folder of your Flash IDE. For example, if you are using Adobe Flash CS4 on Microsoft Windows XP, extract the package to:%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS4\en\Configuration\Classes\
3. Make sure that the extracted ActionScript class files (.as) are located in:<classpath>\com\nokia\lib\

Once that’s done, here’s how to use the new Device object:

import com.nokia.lib.Device;
var deviceObject:Object = new Device();
deviceObject.DisableAutoRotation(true);
deviceObject.ExpediteConnection();

Pretty simple huh!? You can get all the info, plus other very useful documentation on the Service object (for access Contacts, Messaging, Location, etc), in Forum Nokia Flash Lite Developer’s Library (1.4) now.